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[SirPeebles]

I had a little argument with some others on this forum when I defended the use of Fahrenheit over Celsius.  In all other aspects, I think the metric system is generally preferable, but you will never convince me that Celsius is better for everyday use than Fahrenheit.

Yeah, I think I've mentioned already in this thread that the downside of the imperial system is that there are so many wacky conversions between units measuring the same thing.  But with temperature there is no such issue.  Imperial measures all temperatures in Fahrenheit, Metric measures all in Celsius, SI measures all in Kelvin.  While there is some scientific basis for Kelvin being superior, there is no particularly strong reason to use Celsius over Fahrenheit.  Ideally, we would just fix Boltzmann's constant and measure temperatures in units of energy rather than using Kelvin.

[Kuildeous]

"The number 3 in itself is what destroys metric units"

Bwahahahaha! This guy must be trolling.

Theory, I agree with you that I prefer Fahrenheit, though I'm American, so I admit some bias.

But there is greater subtlety in going up or down a degree in F than in C. That would have a greater appeal to the layperson, I would think.

[jonts26]

Yeah, I think I've mentioned already in this thread that the downside of the imperial system is that there are so many wacky conversions between units measuring the same thing.  But with temperature there is no such issue.  Imperial measures all temperatures in Fahrenheit, Metric measures all in Celsius, SI measures all in Kelvin.  While there is some scientific basis for Kelvin being superior, there is no particularly strong reason to use Celsius over Fahrenheit.  Ideally, we would just fix Boltzmann's constant and measure temperatures in units of energy rather than using Kelvin.

The Kelvin thing isn't a problem. The imperial system has Rankine to fill your absolute temperature needs.

[Awaclus]

I had a little argument with some others on this forum when I defended the use of Fahrenheit over Celsius.  In all other aspects, I think the metric system is generally preferable, but you will never convince me that Celsius is better for everyday use than Fahrenheit.

I think Celsius is pretty convenient when you are preparing tea.

[SirPeebles]

I had a little argument with some others on this forum when I defended the use of Fahrenheit over Celsius.  In all other aspects, I think the metric system is generally preferable, but you will never convince me that Celsius is better for everyday use than Fahrenheit.

I think Celsius is pretty convenient when you are preparing tea.

I don't use any temperature scales when I'm preparing tea.  I can tell when the water is boiling from the bubbles.  Then I let it cool a bit.

[Axxle]

"The number 3 in itself is what destroys metric units"

Bwahahahaha! This guy must be trolling.

Theory, I agree with you that I prefer Fahrenheit, though I'm American, so I admit some bias.

But there is greater subtlety in going up or down a degree in F than in C. That would have a greater appeal to the layperson, I would think.

I mean, 12 is a nice number for divisors, it's why our day is split up into 24 hours. But that's not a good enough reason to keep the imperial system around.

[WanderingWinder]

"The number 3 in itself is what destroys metric units"

Bwahahahaha! This guy must be trolling.

Theory, I agree with you that I prefer Fahrenheit, though I'm American, so I admit some bias.

But there is greater subtlety in going up or down a degree in F than in C. That would have a greater appeal to the layperson, I would think.

I mean, 12 is a nice number for divisors, it's why our day is split up into 24 hours. But that's not a good enough reason to keep the imperial system around.

If everything were 12s, it really wouldn't be so bad.

[Kuildeous]

Make everything base 12!

Of if you grew up that way, base 10!

[Awaclus]

I had a little argument with some others on this forum when I defended the use of Fahrenheit over Celsius.  In all other aspects, I think the metric system is generally preferable, but you will never convince me that Celsius is better for everyday use than Fahrenheit.

I think Celsius is pretty convenient when you are preparing tea.

I don't use any temperature scales when I'm preparing tea.  I can tell when the water is boiling from the bubbles.  Then I let it cool a bit.

You shouldn't let the water boil (unless you are going to throw that water away anyway), it ruins the water.

But the point was, the time you need for cooling depends on the tea. Of course you could just do trial-and-error until you find the correct time for each kind of tea, but it's much easier to just look what the instructions say about the temperature and calculate the time, you'll get it correct on your first try.

[SirPeebles]

I had a little argument with some others on this forum when I defended the use of Fahrenheit over Celsius.  In all other aspects, I think the metric system is generally preferable, but you will never convince me that Celsius is better for everyday use than Fahrenheit.

I think Celsius is pretty convenient when you are preparing tea.

I don't use any temperature scales when I'm preparing tea.  I can tell when the water is boiling from the bubbles.  Then I let it cool a bit.

You shouldn't let the water boil (unless you are going to throw that water away anyway), it ruins the water.

But the point was, the time you need for cooling depends on the tea. Of course you could just do trial-and-error until you find the correct time for each kind of tea, but it's much easier to just look what the instructions say about the temperature and calculate the time, you'll get it correct on your first try.

I'm not going to dignify the "ruined water" comment.

If each tea is a different number that you just look up or read off of the instructions, how is Celsius more convenient than Fahrenheit?  It would be like reading the number 83 instead of 192 or something like that.  Maybe you know the Celsius numbers by heart, but you would know the Fahrenheit ones just as well if you'd learned them.

[Teproc]

I don't see why Fahrenheit is better than Celsius. THe argument is that Fahrenheit is more precise and gives you abetter idea of how warm it actually is right ? But I don't know, 19 and 20°C are clear enough to me I guess. I don't think Celsius is incredibly superior (although I do like it better with the 0 and 100 thing), it's just that it's annoying to me when I watch an American TV show or movie and they talk about the heat with those ridiculous numbers that I don't understand. It's kind of like the British driving on the left side : it's not that driving on he right side is much better, it's just that it feels like you're being a contrarian for the sake of it.

[Awaclus]

I had a little argument with some others on this forum when I defended the use of Fahrenheit over Celsius.  In all other aspects, I think the metric system is generally preferable, but you will never convince me that Celsius is better for everyday use than Fahrenheit.

I think Celsius is pretty convenient when you are preparing tea.

I don't use any temperature scales when I'm preparing tea.  I can tell when the water is boiling from the bubbles.  Then I let it cool a bit.

You shouldn't let the water boil (unless you are going to throw that water away anyway), it ruins the water.

But the point was, the time you need for cooling depends on the tea. Of course you could just do trial-and-error until you find the correct time for each kind of tea, but it's much easier to just look what the instructions say about the temperature and calculate the time, you'll get it correct on your first try.

I'm not going to dignify the "ruined water" comment.

If each tea is a different number that you just look up or read off of the instructions, how is Celsius more convenient than Fahrenheit?  It would be like reading the number 83 instead of 192 or something like that.  Maybe you know the Celsius numbers by heart, but you would know the Fahrenheit ones just as well if you'd learned them.

Well, I guess it doesn't matter if you are doing it your way (letting it cool down), but you can also tell the temperature of the water while it's warming up by looking at the water and listening to the sound it makes:

158-176 F / 70-80 C: tiny bubbles at the bottom of the pot
176-194 F / 80-90 C: the tiny bubbles begin to rise, the water makes high-pitched sounds
195-203 F / 90-95 C: the bubbles become larger, the pitch gets lower

It's obviously an approximation which is based on the Celsius scale, but still, the Celsius numbers are a lot nicer. Being able to tell 70, 80 and 95 Celsius is also enough for most teas.

[WanderingWinder]

I had a little argument with some others on this forum when I defended the use of Fahrenheit over Celsius.  In all other aspects, I think the metric system is generally preferable, but you will never convince me that Celsius is better for everyday use than Fahrenheit.

I think Celsius is pretty convenient when you are preparing tea.

I don't use any temperature scales when I'm preparing tea.  I can tell when the water is boiling from the bubbles.  Then I let it cool a bit.

You shouldn't let the water boil (unless you are going to throw that water away anyway), it ruins the water.

But the point was, the time you need for cooling depends on the tea. Of course you could just do trial-and-error until you find the correct time for each kind of tea, but it's much easier to just look what the instructions say about the temperature and calculate the time, you'll get it correct on your first try.

I'm not going to dignify the "ruined water" comment.

If each tea is a different number that you just look up or read off of the instructions, how is Celsius more convenient than Fahrenheit?  It would be like reading the number 83 instead of 192 or something like that.  Maybe you know the Celsius numbers by heart, but you would know the Fahrenheit ones just as well if you'd learned them.

Well, I guess it doesn't matter if you are doing it your way (letting it cool down), but you can also tell the temperature of the water while it's warming up by looking at the water and listening to the sound it makes:

158-176 F / 70-80 C: tiny bubbles at the bottom of the pot
176-194 F / 80-90 C: the tiny bubbles begin to rise, the water makes high-pitched sounds
195-203 F / 90-95 C: the bubbles become larger, the pitch gets lower

It's obviously an approximation which is based on the Celsius scale, but still, the Celsius numbers are a lot nicer. Being able to tell 70, 80 and 95 Celsius is also enough for most teas.

One assumes the Celsius numbers are nicer because they are imprecise, and whoever wrote what you looked at rounded them FOR the Celsius scale. At any rate, I don't think these numbers ARE actually any nicer, but if you want to make this argument, it seems to me that you would bow to the one about air temperatures in Fahrenheit. I don't buy that one, either, really (for me anyway) - to me, neither is really a nicer scale than the other.

[SirPeebles]

I always considered the freezing and boiling points of water to be useful from a practical point of view for calibration.  While you don't need to assign these points the values 0 and 100, they at least seemed to me to be relatively well defined values for an extremely abundant substance on Earth that easy enough to distill.  But today I realized that back in the 1700s, it would have been pretty difficult to freeze water on demand in order to calibrate your thermometer.  Did they only calibrate thermometers in the winter?  Boiling water was of course simple enough.

[Kirian]

So it finally occurred to me after reading some of this that the reason Fahrenheit keeps hanging on (other than stubborn arrogant Americans) has nothing to do with precision.  In fact, it's exactly the opposite; it has to do with imprecision.  And--amusingly--it's because of base 10.  Let's face it, most people, if asked to estimate the temperature, are not going to estimate to within one degree--either Fahrenheit or Celsius.  You might have some super-savants who can tell the temperature to within 2 °C, but those are going to be few and far between.

But when we talk about the temperature, we don't worry about that sort of precision anyway.  "It's in the low 50s" is pretty much as good as anyone ever uses or needs for determining what to wear outside.  But "in the low 50s" Fahrenheit is a much smaller range than "in the low teens" Celsius.  In fact, "the low teens" Celsius stretches over the whole "fifties" Fahrenheit.  And since we humans, with our ten-digit set of upper appendages, like to group things into 10s, we'd rather have that group of ten be somewhat smaller rather than somewhat larger.  That way we can say "Yeah, it's about 50" when it's 45, and those around us can't really complain, but it's much harder to say "yeah, it's about 10" and not get grumbles when it's actually 5.

[Kirian]

Did they only calibrate thermometers in the winter?

My guess is that yes, they would only do those sorts of calibrations when ice was readily available.

Also, consider that the size of the (old) Fahrenheit scale was based on the difference between water's freezing point (32) and the human body's temp (96) was set to exactly 64, so that Fahrenheit could do his calibrations simply by marking halves.

[florrat]

@Kirian: That might be a small argument in favor of the Fahrenheit scale, but estimating temperature in multiples of 5 °C is almost as good.

To the people who prefer Fahrenheit over Celsius, can you give arguments why it's better. I grew up using Celsius, and I agree that the difference in usefulness between Fahrenheit and Celsius is very small, there are at least two small reasons in favor of Celcius:
-The 0 °C is useful as freezing point of water (and 100 °C might be useful as boiling point).
-Easier conversion between Kelvin and Celcius (this is similar to Fahrenheit and Rankine, but is the Rankine temperature scale ever used?)
Are there such arguments in favor of Fahrenheit (Kirian gave one, are there others)?

[Kirian]

@Kirian: That might be a small argument in favor of the Fahrenheit scale, but estimating temperature in multiples of 5 °C is almost as good.

To the people who prefer Fahrenheit over Celsius, can you give arguments why it's better. I grew up using Celsius, and I agree that the difference in usefulness between Fahrenheit and Celsius is very small, there are at least two small reasons in favor of Celcius:
-The 0 °C is useful as freezing point of water (and 100 °C might be useful as boiling point).
-Easier conversion between Kelvin and Celcius (this is similar to Fahrenheit and Rankine, but is the Rankine temperature scale ever used?)
Are there such arguments in favor of Fahrenheit (Kirian gave one, are there others)?

Oh dear, I've been mistaken for a booster of the Fahrenheit scale!  I haz a sad now.  I was just pointing out an extra reason it persists, despite Americans claiming that the scale is more precise or some such bullshit.

As far as Rankin: I finished my engineering degree in 1998.  At that time, we were still doing calculations involving Rankin, pound-moles, and BTUs.  </shudder>

[jonts26]

-Easier conversion between Kelvin and Celcius (this is similar to Fahrenheit and Rankine, but is the Rankine temperature scale ever used?)

Yep. Anyone doing heat transfer type engineering work in America often has to use Rankine.

[florrat]

Oh dear, I've been mistaken for a booster of the Fahrenheit scale!  I haz a sad now.

Sorry to make you sad, but I didn't mistake your for a booster of the Fahrenheit scale, I just (tried to) objectively state(d) that you gave a small argument in favor of the Fahrenheit scale...

[Kuildeous]

To the people who prefer Fahrenheit over Celsius, can you give arguments why it's better.

No.

I prefer it, but I cannot say for certain that it's not because of cultural bias. Even the fact that I say that it the measurements are smaller may only be a justification because F is ingrained in my four decades of hearing temperatures. Honestly, if it ever switches to C (or K), then I'd struggle for a bit, but I'd get used to it. I don't think F is inherently better than C.